tldr: Request for papers

Blockspace Futures

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Blockspace Futures

“Blockspace is the best product to sell in the 2020s” - Some guy at a16z

This RFP seeks proposals for designing and implementing a blockspace futures (or more generally derivatives) contract protocol. Blockspace futures would allow consumers of blockspace that require predictability around inclusion of transactions in the future to operate with more confidence.

Problem Statement

This RFP focuses on base-layer blockchain protocol design for blockspace futures, rather than blockspace futures as part of a composable DeFi ecosystem. In other words, how to adapt (or design from scratch) a blockchain that supports blockspace futures as a feature. A successful proposal will answer the following questions, and address the following points:

  • What are the shortcomings of existing blockspace futures proposals?
  • A protocol proposal for a blockchain’s state transition function and consensus rules, such that it supports blockspace futures. These can be based on gas, or on other resources.
  • What tradeoffs exist in the proposed protocol, especially regarding censorship resistance? Which actors are trusted, vs which actors are decentralized?
  • Which additional assumptions are needed for the proposed protocol to provide its guarantees?
  • A proof-of-concept implementation of the proposal, either as a smart contract arbitrator on e.g. Ethereum or Solana, or as a separate blockchain.

In Places to Start, we suggest a few places to begin exploring the tradeoff space.

Background

Blockchains offer a shared ledger that is publicly available and can be written to by anyone in the world at any time—with constraints. One of these constraints is a cap on the resource rate i.e. a quantity of resources over time. For example, the Bitcoin blockchain’s cap is 4 megabytes every 10 minutes on average, while Ethereum’s cap is on average 15 million gas and 0.375 megabytes per 12 seconds, and Celestia’s cap is 8 megabytes per 12 seconds.

Since these resources are finite, the blockchains must have some mechanism to distribute the permission to write to the ledger, in case demand exceeds supply. Almost universally, this comes in the form of transaction fees. Since demand for these finite resources may fluctuate, the fees paid by users may also fluctuate—significantly, at times.

While this fluctuation is a problem for individual end users, it’s an even more significant problem for protocols built on top of the base blockchains, such as rollup sequencers or rollup-as-a-service providers, which often have some time lag between their own users paying for inclusion and settling their blocks to the base blockchains.

Enter blockspace futures, a mechanism by which users can purchase blockchain in the future in the present. While simple in concept, blockchain futures face many non-trivial hurdles. For example, a protocol that guarantees a user can use a particular amount of resources in a future block also must guarantee that that user can have their transaction included in a future block. This is isomorphic to a guarantee of transaction inclusion in general, which is isomorphic to fair ordering, which is impossible in the general case! With additional assumptions, such a protocol could be made to work, though analysis would be required.

Places to Start

dYdX provides a concrete implementation of DelayMsg in the Cosmos SDK, guaranteeing future execution through present availability. On the other hand, GasToken can be thought of as a blockspace future without guarantees of future inclusion, but rather as a DeFi primitive to speculate on the price of resources. These represent two extremes, and might be a good starting place to look for a middle ground.

Resources

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